Comment on What are the recommend changes to make iPhone more private?

• adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  If you do, you have to be very careful. SOME data is encrypted at rest in iCloud, not all. It doesn’t matter if it’s encrypted in transit if it’s readable on the servers. Also, while some iCloud services are encrypted remotely against your private key, other services can also be decrypted by an Apple support key.

  You can go through each service to ensure it (currently) fits your privacy needs, or you can just go with the basic rule that data managed by others is not private.

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  • nitefox@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Oh yeah, afaik the only services which don’t have end to end encryption are the mail, books, calendar and contacts storages. Most stuff is E2E (if you enable it)

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    • adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      E2E refers to data in transit: the data will be encrypted between its source and destination. It says nothing about how that data is protected once it has arrived.

      E2E iCloud means a third party won’t be able to snoop on the data while you are reading from iCloud or writing to iCloud. But Apple employees can still log into your account and decrypt the data at rest on iCloud in many circumstances because the data at rest is encrypted against a key held by Apple.

      A recent example of how this can go wrong was seen with Azure (which hosts some of iCloud) where a Microsoft dev key leaked and attackers were able to use it to generate a working decryption key for the US Government Azure service (a different product) and read terabytes of government data off the cloud services.

      The attackers could have targeted iCloud hosting services instead of the US government and done the same thing for all data in all iCloud accounts not specifically encrypted against a personal key held only in your personal keychain.

      And if you use iCloud Keychain of course, the same technique can be used to attack your keychain by pretending to be Apple Support and “recover” the contents of the keychain.

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      • Bitrot@lemmy.sdf.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        According to Apple they do not have the keys when you enable Advanced Data Protection, which is why they force you to have your own backup recovery methods (recovery key, recovery contacts).

        iCloud Keychain recovery is also much more complex than you are describing.

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  • Laitinlok@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Yes Apple has their iCloud key, if you live in China, the key is controlled by the Ccp, potentially dangerous for abuse from lea, highly recommend not to use Apple devices if you live there.

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    • adespoton@lemmy.ca ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Unlike Microsoft, Apple appears to use unique regional keys for iCloud, so this risk is significantly less than it could be.

      Having said that, that means that the key associated with your iCloud account will be for the region you set when you set up the account— so if you move, I believe your data is still stored in the original region and the key is for the original region.

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      • Laitinlok@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        You know some people like to hack real people’s phone for fun

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      • Laitinlok@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        Ok

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